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Raising eyebrows in Mumbai

Chitra Nair waltzes past vendors selling fresh sugar-cane juice and roasted peanuts and makes her way to the boardwalk in front of the Gateway of India, a majestic archway built on the shore of the Arabian Sea in 1911 at the height of the Raj to mark the visit of the British king.

Chitra Nair, 24, a Mumbai belly dance instructor, shows off a “Lucifer’s Angel” tattoo on her back that she kept secret from her father for 18 months. (RICK WESTHEAD / TORONTO STAR)

Mumbai–Chitra Nair waltzes past vendors selling fresh sugar-cane juice and roasted peanuts and makes her way to the boardwalk in front of the Gateway of India, a majestic archway built on the shore of the Arabian Sea in 1911 at the height of the Raj to mark the visit of the British king.

It's about a half-hour past dusk and the nearby Taj Hotel, a landmark long before last year's terrorist attack, is lit up in floodlights. As Nair chats with a friend, several dozen men taking pictures of one another in front of the Gateway stop posing. Their stares and cameras instead settle on the 24-year-old belly dance instructor who has braved the streets of this port city on a recent Saturday night wearing a black spaghetti-strap top.

"I guess I just got tired of being told what I can do," Nair said, ignoring the attention. "If someone tries to grope me, they get a punch or a kick. If they say something bad to me, I'll tell them they should feel shame or will say `Have you no mother or sister at home?' It seems to work."

Nair, whose father is a retired rear admiral and the head of "an extremely conservative family," says she probably wouldn't have dared to wear a provocative top outdoors even a year ago. But these days, she says many of her girlfriends push boundaries when it comes to their clothing and lifestyles.

"Who should tell us what we can do?" Nair said, brushing long black hair off her shoulder to reveal a large tattoo on her upper back that reads "Lucifer's Angel."

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Nair is an example of culture in transition. While India may be the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, modesty and submission to males have been the norm for most Indian women. Until recently, that is. These days, at least in India's urbanized middle class there is a new openness about sexuality and frankness about social mores has become a staple of the Indian media, particularly television.

TV commercials show women holding and drinking from soft-drink bottles in sexually suggestive ways while local newspapers, in a move that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, feature pictures of female models in full-page ads for condoms.

While many see the new openness as a sign of a culture maturing, not everyone is happy.

Earlier this year in the Indian city of Mangalore, young men who belonged to an offshoot of a Hindu nationalistic party attacked groups of panicked women who had dared to visit pubs.

The incident was caught on video and about 30 men were arrested. The same political group protested the celebration of Valentine's Day this year, saying the contrived holiday was a conspiracy to dilute Indian culture.

More recently, another conservative party called Shiv Sena sent young activists to the streets of Mumbai – many residents still call it Bombay – after the release a week ago of a Bollywood movie called Kurbaan ("The Sacrifice.")

The problem: the movie's billboards showed the bare back of the film's female star. Hundreds of placards were defaced, and in some instances, protesters tacked up fabric on posters to make it look like the actress was wearing a sari.

Shiv Sena official Anil Desai defended the protests, saying the billboards were "porn-like."

"We think these kinds of posters have an adverse effect on peoples' psyche and it leads to wayward behaviour," Desai said.

"People who object to vulgarity nowadays are labelled as fanatics and fundamentalists or very orthodox," he said. "That's not the case. We know that India has to change with the times and move forward. We just don't think it has to be undignified."

And indeed, Shiv Sena isn't the only pocket of resistance to Western influences within India. Take the country's music scene. Few Western musicians have established a fan base in this country of 1.1 billion and many of India's leading rock bands have stopped recording in English, focusing instead on Hindi and India's other languages.

Still, a TV Guide provides proof of how rapidly local culture is changing. Over the past 25 years, India has gone from one single channel, state-operated Doordarshan, to 562, and the number of TV sets has exploded from 3.5 million to 125 million.

The battle for viewers and advertising dollars has prompted some channels to push cultural limits. One recent cable TV show called Sach ka Saamna ("Facing the Truth") featured contestants being grilled by the show's host while they were hooked up to a lie detector. A middle-aged woman with kids admitted she would be willing to have an affair; another contestant, a young Muslim woman, said she wore a burqa to slip out of her house and neighbourhood to meet up with her boyfriend.

"You couldn't imagine a show like this on TV in our country even five years ago," said Ritul Joshi, a prime time news anchor with cable TV channel Aaj Tak. "Some of this comes from our history as a colony for hundreds of years. There's this mindset still that anything Western should be aped and anyone who does that is upwardly mobile and progressive. It's even happening in some smaller villages."

One cable channel that's fast making inroads is NDTV Good Times. A few weeks ago, it began broadcasting a new reality show called The Hunt for the Kingfisher Calendar Girl 2010. A local beer company, Kingfisher started marketing a calendar featuring models in bikinis almost a decade ago. When the calendar started, all of the models either wore one- or two-piece bathing suits. This year, four of the 12 models are topless, using their hair or hands to cover their breasts.

The reality show, which airs every Friday at 10 p.m., features some of the thousands of women who applied to be included in next year's calendar.

"When we started the show there was some apprehension, but so far there has been no opposition at all," said Arati Singh, an NDTV Good Times programming executive. "This has been coming since the early 1990s when cable TV came to India and the skirts started getting shorter."

Sitting in a coffee shop a few blocks from Mumbai's waterfront, Nair said India is embracing change in ways that won't be reversed. In a bid to stop taunting and harassment of women, a long-standing problem known as eve teasing, officials have introduced women-only compartments on some train routes, and in New Delhi, India's capital, a new women's-only taxi service has started up.

"These are good changes," Nair said. But some things never change.

"I didn't show my father for a year and a half," she said, glancing at the tattoo.

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